December 18, 2012 AT 4:25 pm

In this lesson you will learn how to remote control your Raspberry Pi with a console cable. The great advantage of connecting this way is that it can even supply the power for your Pi and you do not need keyboard, mouse or display attached to the Pi to log into it.

You will need to install terminal emulation software (ZOC) and also USB drivers for the Console Lead. ZOC is available for Mac and Windows and allows you to communicate through a serial port from your Mac or PC to another computer – in this case the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi uses its built-in serial port to allow devices to connect to its console and issue commands just as if you were logged in.

In the next lesson, we will look at another way of doing much the same thing but over a local network using something called SSH.

In the first lesson of this series, we showed you how to prepare an SD card containing an operating system for your Raspberry Pi. In this lesson, we will show you how to setup your Raspberry Pi the first time you boot it up.

We do this using a tool called Raspi-Config that runs automatically the first time you boot your Raspberry Pi. This starts before the windowing system and so you have to use the cursor keys and Return key to navigate the menu system.

It is a bit like adjusting the BIOS settings on a PC, once you have things right, you probably won’t need it again.

We will start with the options that are most important and then look at some of the other options that you may wish to configure.

When you buy a Raspberry Pi, it may or may not be sold with an SD card. The SD card is important because this is where the Raspberry Pi keeps its operating system and is also where you will store your documents and programs.

Even if your Pi came with an SD card with the operating system on, it is a good idea to update it to the latest version, as improvements and bug fixes are going in all the time. Since putting the operating system onto an SD card wipes everything else off the card, it is worth considering using a USB flash drive for your documents, so that when you install a new version of the operating system, you dont’ have the complication of copying them off somewhere self before reformatting the SD card.

If your Pi did not come with an SD card then the minimum size you should get is 4GB, but buy a bigger SD card if you think you will need the space.
This lesson shows you how to create an SD card for your Raspberry Pi.